Renewable Energy
Monitoring and control for solar and distributed generation.
- Scope
- Ground to Cloud
- Approach
- Retrofit first
- Base
- Bangalore, India
The brief
What this sector asks of a control system
Generation assets are spread out and often unstaffed, which makes remote visibility the whole game. We deploy monitoring and control for solar and distributed generation — string-level performance, inverter health, and yield reporting that flags an underperforming array before the month closes.
Every engagement starts the same way: we walk the floor, read the existing drawings, and write down what is actually installed before anyone proposes a platform. The sector decides the priorities — the plant decides the design.
Constraints we engineer around
What we bring
Disciplines we lead with in renewable energy
The same engineering team carries the work from the panel to the dashboard, so nothing is lost at a handover between vendors.
In detail
What shapes the work here
The constraints that decide how a system for this sector gets engineered.
Nobody is standing there
Generation assets are spread out and usually unstaffed, so remote visibility is the whole job. A fault that a manned plant would notice in minutes can run for weeks on a remote array, and the loss is silent.
That makes connectivity design as important as the monitoring itself. Sites with poor coverage need edge buffering, so a dropped link costs you latency rather than a hole in the yield record.
Underperformance hides in averages
A site can meet its overall target while a portion of it quietly underperforms. String-level and inverter-level measurement is what separates soiling from shading from a genuine fault, and it is the difference between cleaning the array and replacing hardware.
Comparative analysis does most of the work here: strings under identical conditions should behave identically, and the ones that do not are where to look.
Yield reporting that settles arguments
Where generation is sold or shared, the record is commercial. Metering has to be accurate, calibrated and traceable, and the reports have to reconcile with what the counterparty sees.
Building that properly at commissioning avoids a category of dispute that is very difficult to settle after the fact.
Typical scope
What we are brought in to do
- Remote monitoring for unstaffed solar and distributed generation
- String-level performance comparison and fault isolation
- Inverter health monitoring and alarm escalation
- Yield and availability reporting for commercial settlement
- Edge buffering at sites with unreliable connectivity
Engineering constraints
- Remote sites
- Connectivity design comes first
- Granularity
- String level, not site average
- Settlement
- Calibrated, traceable metering
Common questions
- Our site has poor mobile coverage — is monitoring still viable?
- Yes. Edge nodes record locally and forward when the link returns, so intermittent coverage delays the data rather than losing it. Alarms can also be sent over SMS where data is unreliable.
- Can you monitor inverters from different manufacturers?
- Usually. Most modern inverters expose Modbus or a documented API. Mixed fleets are normalised at the gateway so one dashboard covers the site.
- How do we tell soiling from a fault?
- By comparing strings under the same conditions. Uniform decline across the array points to soiling; divergence between comparable strings points to a fault worth sending someone for.
Elsewhere
